Nonlinear Exchange Rate Adjustment and the Monetary Model

Although the empirical literature has delivered evidence in favor of nonlinearities in nominal and real exchange rate adjustment, the corresponding mechanisms with respect to the relationship between nominal exchange rates and fundamentals in general have rarely been put under any close scrutiny. This paper extends the work of other authors, who estimate exponential smooth transition autoregressive models to deviations of the exchange rate from monetary fundamentals. Using monthly data from 1976:01 to 2010:12 for the USA, UK, and Japan, this paper first adopts a cointegrated vector autoregression (VAR) framework to test for the multivariate validity of the monetary model by applying restrictions on the long-run relationships. Then, nonlinear vector error correction models are estimated to tackle the question of whether the adjustment of the nominal exchange rate with respect to those relationships follows a nonlinear path.